Captain Ed asks, “Since when has Geneva protected our troops?” He addresses the fallacy of the argument made by some regarding our need to apply Geneva Convention standards to treatement of terrorists and how, if we don’t, it will somehow put our troops at risk.

We have yet to fight against a wartime enemy that followed the GC with any consistency at all. The Germans routinely violated it even before Hitler began issuing orders to shoot captured pilots, and the massacre at Malmedy only crystallized what had been fairly brutal treatment at the hands of the Nazis for American prisoners (the Luftwaffe was one notable exception). The Japanese treatment of POWs was nothing short of barbaric, both before and after Bataan. The same is true for the North Koreans and the Chinese in the Korean War, and McCain himself is a routine example of the kind of treatment our men suffered at the hands of the Vietnamese.

One quote he highlights is interesting:

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, warned the administration against taking on Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war.

“They’re trying to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions,’’ Mr. Levin said, “but the best expert on that is somebody who has very personal experience with those who violate Geneva, and that’s Senator McCain.”

Ed doesn’t bring this up, but I think Levin’s argument actually hurts his position more than it helps. This is because the Geneva Conventions were well established when McCain became a POW. McCain was tortured during his captivity, which would indicate that despite the existence of the GC, American troops were still at risk. And that was a sovereign nation torturing a uniformed soldier.

This reminds me of the argument John Kerry kept trying to make in the 2004 campaign supporting the Assault Weapons Ban. He would give examples of why the ban should remain in place, but those examples were direct proof the ban didn’t work.

Here, Levin is using McCain’s absolute moral authority on the subject, but the fact he’s become such a firsthand authority on the subject of being a tortured American POW proves that the existence of the GC’s don’t bear on whether the animals we fight will treat our soldiers humanely or not.

This whole case is about protecting American civilians from the animals that want us all to convert to Islam or enjoy the find art of decapitation. Whether we use water-boarding, sleep deprivation or mints on their pillows and a swedish massage, there is no difference in how they will treat our captured soldiers. NONE. They’re animals at heart. If they’re willing to walk into a market and brutally murder innocent men, women and children who are not combatants, nothing will change the way they treat captured soldiers. NOTHING.

Ed sums it up pretty well:

Congress wants the Bush administration to follow the GC in handling terrorists, and that’s a legitimate position to take. If that’s what Congress wants, then it had better be prepared to define acceptable and unacceptable practices with more precision than “shocks the conscience”. That kind of loose, easily-manipulated legal standard only puts our men and women at risk for all sorts of courtroom mischief and misdirected prosecutions. We can follow the GC while defining what it specifically means into American law; it isn’t the Constitution, and other treaties get incorporated into American law all of the time. Hiding behind that nonspecific standard is an abdication of Congressional responsibility, and the argument of reflexive treatment is a canard that these men are using as a red herring to hide that abdication.

I agree.